My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, is absolutely right to raise this as an important issue. Currently, planning, in the sense of local authority planning services and applications, depends on landowners bringing forward sites for housing or business use for inclusion in the local authority local plan; councils then make the decision as to which of those sites are in fact acceptable. That is not a strategic approach, which is exactly why she has brought this amendment forward. It draws attention to sites that are allegedly appropriate for development but it excludes the importance of nature recovery, ELMS and all the other issues—we discussed ancient woodlands at our last sitting on Report. It also fails to draw attention to the importance of watercourses as part of a planning process, which is of course why we had the debate on the previous day on Report on nutrient neutrality.
The noble Baroness is right to draw our attention to this as an issue to which we ought to have a strategic approach. I will wait to hear the Minister’s response, but the Government ought to consider having an overview of how they expect land to be used, rather than just leave it to landowners to determine whether they have sites they wish to put forward for development.